Information on the original novel?

[Lady Sierra]

I'm sorry if this question and/or its answer is already somewhere on one of the forums--I looked around, but I didn't see anything. (Also, I wasn't sure which forum to post it on, so...sorry if it's on the wrong one.)

I'm looking for information about the original Chinese novel which inspired the Suikoden series. I'm planning on writing a cultural anthropology paper on the aspects of culture reflected in video games, and I wanted to use Suikoden, since it's my favorite series, and the one I know best, but without information on the earlier work--not to mention the significance of some of the numbers that come up most frequently (5 out of 6, 27, 108)--it's going to be difficult to proceed. So I came here, because I seemed to recall that there was information about the novel here, but...that was several years ago, and the site's been redesigned at least once (probably several times) since then, and if the information I need is still here, I can't find it.

If anyone happens to know where I can find some information on the original novel, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

[patapi]

You can try the Search function to seek specific topics in the forums, but here's a wiki-link as a starting point of sorts:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shui_Hu_Zhuan